What is it about?
Soil microbes, such microalgae, bacteria and fungi, are able to feed each other essential nutrients. Mutualistic relationships arise when one microbe needs a nutrient that another can provide, and viceversa. Using a mathematical model we predict the survival of mutualistic microbial populations growing in chambers separated in space, but connected by a channel carrying the essential nutrient made by the partner.
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Why is it important?
Our work is relevant to understanding microbial communities in the soil, which can be described as a network of connected chambers. Understanding such soil microbial communities is very important for the development of new sustainable agritechnologies. It is also important for bioremediation, the use of microbes to clean polluted land.
Perspectives
This paper was published in an interdisciplinary physics journal, but I hope its readership will include microbial bioengineers, soil microbiologists/physicists and microbial ecologist, among others. A lot of what is learned by biologists, bioengineers and biophysicists in the lab, by mathematical/computational modelling, as we have done, can an should be applied to understand real soil to improve agriculture and bioengineering.
Dr Ottavio A Croze
Newcastle University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Mutualism between microbial populations in structured environments: the role of geometry in diffusive exchanges, August 2017, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press,
DOI: 10.1101/172924.
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